


The Thing With Feathers

by Butterfly



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-03-26
Updated: 2004-03-26
Packaged: 2017-10-17 13:24:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/177290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Butterfly/pseuds/Butterfly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Illyria abides and Wesley does his best to do the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Thing With Feathers

**Author's Note:**

> Set after the episode _Shells_ in S5.
> 
> Title from an Emily Dickinson poem.

Yesterday, Illyria had helped him find a demon -- Mm'Kari Nacturm, to be precise. Fascinating creatures, as it turned out. Mm'Kari communicated solely by a means of clicks and grunts that were far below human hearing. Even Angel had only been able to hear the uppermost part of the demon's register. Illyria had been incredibly helpful in identifying the demon, at least by its own standards, and had even told him a little of what that demon had been in its time. There had just been the one, back when Illyria had ruled -- interestingly, all the demons that Illyria mentioned were unique. The ability to reproduce seemed to have come with the advent of the animal. Lesser demons, the ones that were able to survive the coming of humans, of reasoning mammals, had seen the advantage of numbers and developed the ability accordingly. Illyria wasn't terribly informed about that particular biological change, as it had already been betrayed by that time, but he was able to supplement its limited knowledge with what he could glean from the forgotten texts.

So Illyria had helped him to find the demon, and for a moment, when his eyes met with Illyria's over a book, he'd felt a connection. Brief, yet compelling. For a moment, he'd felt something only associated with researching alongside Fred -- a tingle and a glow from the knowledge of shared intellect and interest. Then Illyria hadn't blinked, and he had. When his eyes had closed, he'd felt a traitorious twinge in his chest, but when they'd opened again to meet frozen, dead eyes, both the connection and the ache inside him vanished into the numbness that he lived with now.

Illyria had cocked its head, the movement reminding him rather uncomfortably of the preying mantis, and had inquired after his well-being. It hadn't seemed satisfied with his standard answer but didn't ask again, instead changing the subject back to demon lore. Illyria was getting rather too good at discerning human emotion. It had spent much of their early time together questioning him on the pecularities of the human species but soon after that had seemed to concentrate on learning by observation.

When he'd inquired as to the change, Illyria had told him that it learned far more from how he acted than from what he said. That his actions often contradicted his words, and that every other human that it had watched appeared much the same. "A race of tricksters," it had said, and he is still uncertain whether the words had been meant with contempt or with an odd sort of admiration.

Oddly, Illyria seemed to be attached to him. Odd, because it certainly hadn't cared about Knox, and because it had repeatedly expressed puzzlement that his grief for a single life was not yet over. It had grieved, but for the loss of an army and a kingdom and an avatar. For the loss of a part of itself, he found, after speaking with it more closely. Illyria's Army of Doom had not been a true army, but had been a separate part of itself. It was, Illyria had explained, more like finding oneself limbless than to find oneself without a lover. Without its army, Illyria had been weak, and worse, it had not even known of the loss until being confronted with the ashes of itself. It should have been able to sense the death of a part of itself, it had told him, and he'd found himself with the urge to reach out toward Illyria, to somehow comfort it.

He hadn't, of course.

Yet Illyria continued to reach out to him, in its own cold way. And every so often, he would glance up and something in Illyria would whisper of Fred. It only lasted a moment each time but it was happening more and more frequently as the days passed. It knew things that a creature of its sort never would have learned -- knowledge that had to have come from the pieces of Fred that tumbled about inside Illyria.

Knowledge persisted and, he was certain, so did emotion. Illyria was, on occasion, gentle with him. Patient and watchful in a way that it simply didn't act around anyone else. To believe that love could survive death of soul was more than a touch insane, so Wesley found himself quite willing to entertain the notion.

After all, one could not survive without hope.

  
_~end~_   



End file.
